Friday, January 9, 2015

Ever want to push your picture out of Lightroom and onto a drop-shadow or floating mat, like this ? :

Using the Export – Post Processing command to point to a windows .bat file, you can.

Here’s how I did this, using a batch file I had on my desktop. You could call any programming language or shell etc. This .bat file I’ll include lower down.

All the options set above the Post-Processing get activated and the created .jpg is massaged using ImageMagick commands to do the drop shadow and float effects. (I noted in the .bat file where I had found the active steps to do the effect.)

Here’s what the batch file looks like:

When the Post-Processing runs, it pushes the quoted full path and filename of the file you Exported to the program being called – and in Windows batch files that’s referenced by %1%. After that, the ImageMagick command “convert” merges a shadow effect and adds some text below the original image. It also splices on some white on the north, west, south and east in the process. A new file is created with the original name and “-shadow” added before the .jpg. The 2 files end up in whatever “Export Location” you chose. This version can handle files and paths which include spaces btw.

If you want the text of the file and a copy of one that does a shifted shadow (down and to right) I’ll send you that too. It’s just text, you can read up on the commands and play around with it on the fly to do what you prefer. You can reach me from the link on the upper right of the page near “About”.